literature

The Vanishing World

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The Vanishing World
–Sandra Lim

Photo by Samuel McGarrigle on Unsplash

a slip of paper

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A Slip of Paper
–Louise Glück

Today I went to the doctor—
the doctor said I was dying,
not in those words, but when I said it
she didn’t deny it—

What have you done to your body, her silence says.
We gave it to you and look what you did to it,
how you abused it.
I’m not talking only of cigarettes, she says,
but also of poor diet, of drink.

She’s a young woman; the stiff white coat disguises her body.
Her hair’s pulled back, the little female wisps
suppressed by a dark band. She’s not at ease here,

behind her desk, with her diploma over her head,
reading a list of numbers in columns,
some flagged for her attention.
Her spine’s straight also, showing no feeling.

No one taught me how to care for my body.
You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.
Once you’re free of them, your wife takes over, but she’s nervous,
she doesn’t go too far. So this body I have,
that the doctor blames me for—it’s always been supervised by women,
and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

The doctor looks at me—
between us, a stack of books and folders.
Except for us, the clinic’s empty.

There’s a trap-door here, and through that door,
the country of the dead. And the living push you through,
they want you there first, ahead of them.

The doctor knows this. She has her books,
I have my cigarettes. Finally
she writes something on a slip of paper.
This will help your blood pressure, she says.

And I pocket it, a sign to go.
And once I’m outside, I tear it up, like a ticket to the other world.

She was crazy to come here,
a place where she knows no one.
She’s alone; she has no wedding ring.
She goes home alone, to her place outside the village.
And she has her one glass of wine a day,
her dinner that isn’t a dinner.

And she takes off that white coat:
between that coat and her body,
there’s just a thin layer of cotton.
And at some point, that comes off too.

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.
But for a long time you hear every sound.
It’s a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.

 

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

milk nightmare

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Milk Nightmare
–Sachiko Murakami

Night training: a babe becomes accustomed
to the soothing taste of absence.
That same child grows up
and chooses a safe word: milk.

–

I say, We need milk. Everyone agrees
to my duplicity. I pantomime mouthfuls
of emptiness, one hand on the doorknob.

–

Need seems like the only memory
when it is present. First driving need,
then flat-out more. Hauled
to the brink of nightmare
conclusion, counting seconds.

Need. Need. Need.
Need. Need.

–

Need more.

–

Claw the dream dictionary
looking for citations
of original thirst.

Scrub the carpet’s traces
of spilled milk.

Count every Tuesday you wake up,
thirsty, needful, sore.

Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash

blue heart baby

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Blue Heart Baby
–Joy Priest

Everyone wanna put hands on a piece of your life.
Look at it: how it sags in the eigengrau,

like the yellow belly of a bitch heavy with litter.
No better than that meddlin-ass moon, full

as your own breast, hanging low between buildings.
People hang from the chords your heart has let down.

The chaos of stars feel up the dead air. Tiny blue flames
in the eye bone of the young-old junkie girl

follow you around the floor of your humming days. &
have you seen yourself? I think I am weak & without purpose,

your father texts you from the kitchen, sauced up,
after he rolls his heavy body over the loaded pistol

he laid on your bed. Get use to life. Every piece
of advice is one the giver followed to his own

bitterness. You roll the heavy body of the car you loot
from your failed fiancé down the highway. Even

the wheel, wobbling with fury, insists on hanging on,
you must make it to each new mourning alive. Beyond

your silent mouth, what can you use to protect yourself?
The deceitful company of crowds will fail you, have you

out here with your young body, in the cold, a house
dress, barefoot on some other woman’s back porch

where no one knows the address. Let it be,
if this moment is of use to your life. & how long

is a moment in time, indistinguishable as speed—
peep the ant-sized airplane creeping across the crescent.

How to wake up the next day & the next & not simply
after a decade? After 13 blue moons? Stretched belly &

empty veins? The gas of constellations run out. Heart weighted
low in the sky. Your chances scattered across the dead years.

 

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solstice

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Solstice
–Michael McGriff

Photo by Boyan Lepoev on Unsplash

 

wild is the wind

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Wild is the Wind
–Carl Phillips

About what’s past, Hold on when you can, I used to say,
And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those
mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride
turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge —
metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though
the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent
much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un-
knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously,
a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was
just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary
taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow
from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge
every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child
whom I gave some money to and told no one about,
having promised … You must keep what you’ve promised
very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget
is what I’ve always been told. I’ve been told quite
a lot of things. They hover — some more unbidden than
others — in that part of the mind where mistakes and torn
wishes echo as in a room that’s been newly cathedraled,
so that the echo surprises, though lately it’s less the echo
itself that can still most surprise me about memory —
it’s more the time it takes, going away: a mouth opening
to say I love sex with you too it doesn’t mean I wanna stop
my life for it, for example; or just a voice, mouthless,
asking Since when does the indifference of the body’s
stance when we’re alone, unwatched, in late light, amount
to cruelty? For the metaphysical poets, the problem
with weeping for what’s been lost is that tears
wash out memory and, by extension, what we’d hoped
to remember. If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn’t
explanation, at the end of the day, what the sturdier
truths most resist? It’s been my experience that
tears are useless against all the rest of it that, if I
could, I’d forget. That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.

 

Photo by Sachina Hobo on Unsplash

a double rapture

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A Double Rapture
–Anna Swir
Because there is no me
and because I feel
how much there is no me.

Photo by yousef alfuhigi on Unsplash

Charon’s Obol

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Charon’s Obol
–Madeleine Wattenberg

My father gave me a small jar of honey
and each night I took a secret lick.
Long after the gold hardened to granule
my tongue returned to my mouth sweet.
Later he placed between my lips a sliver of peach
or a white pastille
dissolving down—homeopathic moon.
I kept my tongue clean beneath those gifts.

My tongue has since turned.
Sliding against the edges of men,
I wonder where that gold’s gotten to
and settle for a boy who tastes of copper,
who flaps like a whiskey-watered hawk
and scatters me.
I know you don’t mean it—I’d repeated,
until he refused me passage in his horror.
Empty anther. I wash him off with mint.
His sorrys fill my bed until I’m crowded out.
I count them like coin and at night they rattle.

We hope sounds will open our mouths
and force us into breath. I place a coin
across my tongue and practice dying.
In some cold places, the obol staves
return. My lips seal in the acerbic promise;
whole rivers run through me.
How can I know which boat to board—
I’m just trying to pay my way.

He removes the coin from my mouth
with his own hand. My sordid god.
But this is nothing new, this reaching into
and withdrawing. The truth is
I’d tongue the honey from most any hand
that granted me a crossing.

Photo by Art Rachen on Unsplash

 

 

milk tree

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Milk Tree
–Laura Kasischke

Heavy fruit
on bony branches
full of the knowledge one always encounters
too late
at the end of a life. Some

aspirin mixed with water, and a mouse
born in a dream. The sounds my son
once made while suckling. That, made
manifest. Little
milksop
and myself. Our

bodies, temporary
shelters, rented
breath. Not even
here long enough
to lament.

Today the breeze wears a fern:

Shiver
and living in the world, in
your brief green dress.

The amputated breast, like
a soul made out of flesh.

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

binds

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For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

 

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash